[A PRAYING CHURCH] 16. Waking the Sleeping Giant

"The Sunday before Thanksgiving, I would love to see pastors have an awareness that probably about half the people in church are going into a situation with difficult relatives. They're going to be in situations where they're put down or marginalized or ignored. How do they get through that? They need to know the depth of God's love for them. You could almost say that Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3 is a Sunday before Thanksgiving dinner prayer. He's praying Jesus into them." "Pauls' prayer at the end of Ephesians 3 is a prayer for capacity. He's praying that God will grow their capacity so they'll know the height and breadth and depth of God's love for them... that's our most basic need as saints, and that has to come from the Spirit." "Your church is not running seven ministries — everybody, every saint within your congregation is on the front line and running five to twenty ministries, and Thanksgiving Dinner happens to be one of them.... The ministry of the church isn't just the formal things that happen in the building, it is all this love that spills out of this congregation into the people around them."